


portraiture

by besselfcn



Series: darkrooms [2]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Photography, Ye Olde Dick Pics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:09:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21918118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: Arthur receives the parcel in the post one god-awfully hot day in March.
Relationships: Albert Mason/Arthur Morgan
Series: darkrooms [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1690516
Comments: 26
Kudos: 201





	portraiture

**Author's Note:**

> This can stand alone from an earlier piece "[the golden hour](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16899174)", but in my mind the two do take place in the same timeline.

Arthur receives the parcel in the post one god-awfully hot day in March.

It catches his attention more than most parcels he receives by post for a number of reasons, first being that it’s addressed to a _Mr. Arthur Morgan_ , not Tacitus Kilgore nor Arthur Callahan nor a smattering of other names Dutch has imposed upon him over the years. He receives very few packages these days for Mr. Arthur Morgan, and this one doesn’t come embossed with the swirling, practiced scripthand of Mary Linton, so it gives him pause to begin with. 

Second being that the return address is _A. Mason, 54 Bouillard Dr., St. Denis, LM._

He tucks the parcel away in his coat just after he receives it. He doesn’t know why; he just does it. He doesn’t know who it is he’s trying to hide it from: Dutch or John or Mary-Beth or maybe himself. 

After he’s returned off to camp and distributed the mail to its owners--letter for Bill, a bundle of children’s clothes for Abigail, wanted poster scrolled with a threat for Dutch--he closes tight the front flap of his tent and lays his own envelope down in his lap.

It’s thick, and heavy. Made of some sturdy paper material. He tosses it over in his hands a couple of times; it’s got a wax sealing and all on the back. No fancy crest pressed into it or nothing, just the misshapen impression of a wine cork or whatever else Albert had lying around. 

Albert. Albert. It gnaws on his stomach is what it does, that name. 

He pries it open with the edge of the knife in his pocket and dumps the contents into his palm. 

It’s a scattering of photographs; of course it is, what else, what else could it be. He holds the stack of them in reverie, flipping through them gently so he doesn’t touch the glossy finish on the front and ruin the whole specatcle. Here’s an eagle taking flight. Here’s a bear spring-loaded, ready to pounce. Here’s a sweeping landscape with a stark-white blur in the center of it, a note scrawled along the edge that says _the lynx got away_. Here’s a dozen discarded prints, ones Albert deemed not good enough for showmanship, but plenty good to show Arthur. Here’s--

Here’s--

Arthur sucks in a breath through his teeth. He holds the photograph. He turns it over. He turns it again. It’s still the same; not a strange and impossible dream. He’s trying to puzzle through what he’s looking at, but his head is a fuzzy white, like getting struck in the base of the skull. 

The last photograph in the stack is of Albert--standing before a mirror, camera set up before him. He looks down at the glass. His head is tilted forwards. A smile twists across his face. He is naked as the day he was born. 

One hand on the camera trigger. One hand gently wrapped around his cock. Eyes lidded, head down, posture saying _come on, it’s alright_. 

When Arthur can’t stand to look at the front of the photograph anymore, he looks at the back. 

_Mr. Morgan,_

_I have missed your company dearly since our last encounter._

_I have a gallery opening on Rouchelle Street on 9 April. I would be ever so honored if you could find time in your schedule to attend._

_Do write to give notice if you are able. If not, please feel free to join us anyway. Your presence would be my greatest delight._

_With pleasure,_

_Albert Mason_

Arthur grips the photograph in his hands. With the same ferocity with which he impresses upon himself landscapes and scenery and bloodshed, he commits every inch of the image to memory. 

Then he burns it to ash in the candlelight, gripping the edge until his fingertips blister. 

-

The Gallery on Rue Rouchelle is not in the same league as the above-ground showingroom where Arthur had once decked a man for Charles Chateney. 

This gallery is swarmed by men in black tie outfits and women in dresses many layers deep. It looks like the interior of that cruise ship they’d been on; stuffed to the brim with people who had so much money they didn’t know what to do with it except throw it away. 

Arthur’d dressed _nice_ \--nice enough that as he’d left Karen had whisteled at him and Hosea had said _off to the city, dear boy?_ with a conspiratorial wink--but it’s a damn sight insufficient here. He thinks in his plain slacks and button-up vest he might just be turned away at the door. 

But the man at the front says, “Ah, Mr. Mason’s guest. Yes, come in,” and so he does. 

When he enters he already feels claustrophobic. The walls are lined with photographs of rich folk, and the floors are lined with rich folk looking at the photographs. 

Arthur wanders the stuffy walls of the gallery in search of Mason’s photographs for nearly ten full minutes before realizing he has been looking at them all along. All of these portraits--the women dressed in elegant dresses and posing dramatically, the men standing by an unreasonably large and high-backed chair, the children sat playing in the grass--they are Mason’s. The skillful way he captures movement and expression is apparent in all of them, but something is--off. Something is missing. 

“Oh, Mr. Morgan,” he hears through the crowd, “I’m so pleased you could join us tonight.”

Arthur turns, and tries to figure out where to put his hands, and settles for holding one out congenially and says, “Albert.”

Albert takes the hand. Arthur feels a rush through his body, heady and full. 

“Give me just one moment,” Albert says, “and I shall grab my coat.”

It takes Arthur a moment to realize this means they’re leaving. 

“Ain’t this your--” he says, and gestures around. 

“Yes,” Albert says, his eyes bright and sparkling, the way he always looked after he’d gotten his picture. “That’s why I am free to leave.”

-

While Albert’s assistant Claudia (“She is so lovely, so dearly helpful, though she has never saved me from a pack of hungry wolves, you see! But I cannot fault her for that.”) handles the gallery exhibition and sale, Arthur and Albert press into a room in the back of a hotel near the outskirts of St. Denis where the concierge and Albert share a glance that makes Arthur’s head ache to try to decode. 

They come at each other as hungry as the last time; hungrier, maybe, for remembering what it felt like. Arthur lays back again, allows Albert to lead him where he wants him to go, and this time when Albert says _you look beautiful like this_ , he doesn’t quite believe it but he believes that Albert believes it.

Afterwards, Arthur lights a cigarette and says, “Thought you didn’t do those sorts of pictures.”

“What?” Albert asks dimly, his body quite present but his mind seeming to be somewhere else. “Oh. Oh! The gallery showing. Yes. A horrible business.”

Because Arthur’d figured out what it was the pictures was missing, sometime between the walk away from the gallery and the minute Albert touched him. It was life; it was truth; it was a soul. 

“Takin’ photographs of a bunch of rich folk for them to show off to other rich folk,” Arthur sneers. “Thought that went up against all your morals or whatever it was.”

Albert laughs. A clear, high sound. “Yes, well,” he sighs. “As it turns out, morals do not pay the bills, Mr. Morgan.”

Arthur stares at him. His face is blank; his eyes are even closed. 

“That they do not,” Arthur says. 

The lamplight dwindles. Arthur stubs his cigarette out on the ash tray to the side; he thinks of lighting another, but he waits. 

“I,” he says, and stops. Then starts again. “Liked the one picture you did of yourself, though.”

Albert opens one eye. He’s already grinning. 

“An experimental art,” he says. “I do not think it would do well in galleries.”

Arthur scratches the back of his head and shrugs. “Dunno,” he says. “Maybe you ain’t found the right sort of galleries, is all.”

Albert nods as if he is really considering this. “Maybe I have not.”

He closes his eyes again. 

Arthur studies him. The curve of his body. The way his hand rests gently over his chest when he lays back. The thick, rough stubble that coats his chin. The way he stretches out like a cat in the sun. 

It feels so easy, looking at Mason’s photographs. Coming to his gallery events. Shutting himself away in backrooms of particular hotels where nobody’s going to say anything to anybody. Seems simple. Seems obvious. 

Seems, for once, like there’s dozens of other men doing the same thing, hiding in the same ways. Hundreds, maybe. Arthur doesn’t think he’s got the imagination to know for sure. 

He lights another cigarette and presses it between his teeth before he asks, ““They got a name for fellers like us?”

Albert chuckles without mirth. “Oh,” he says. “I imagine they’ve got a lot of names.”

It’s got more bite to it than most anything he’s heard Albert say prior, and it makes Arthur suck in a breath straight through his teeth. He knows what kind of names he’s been called, knows the kind of voice he was called them in. Makes him wanna tear down the whole world and start right over again, thinking about Albert getting that sort of treatment. 

Albert seems to sense it somehow, sits up and looks at Arthur with that soft and pensive look. After a pause, he says, “I’ve heard _invert_ used, among friendlier folk. I always thought it was a funny picture that conjured up.”

Like he’s educating a child. Arthur sorta hates it and sorta doesn’t.

It is, he admits, a funny image, but it don’t feel _wrong_. All his insides twisted around and pulled out through his skin; all the outside parts of him pushed down, down, down, til they get crushed up small and packed away. Whoever came up with it must’ve known, somehow, what that all felt like.

He realizes with a rolling nausea that that’s what he’s feeling, looking at Albert like this. The lack of that crushing. 

He exhales and says, “Can I show you somethin’?”

Albert nods, full of genuine enthusiasm. It almost makes Arthur want to say _nevermind,_ with the intensity of it. 

But so instead he reaches down into his bag and pulls out his journal. He holds it heavy in his hands for a moment; flips through the pages with the covers pressed near each other so Albert can’t see them. He finds eventually the page he was looking for, and before he can think better of it he lets the journal fall open. 

It’s one of his portraits of Albert--him bent over his camera balancing on the rickety edge of a boat. Some of the proportions seeem all wrong now; some of the shading got smudged since he last looked at it.

But Albert’s looking at it with wide and reverant eyes. 

“Oh, _Arthur_ ,” he breathes. “Oh, my lord. You didn’t tell me you were an artist, too.”

“I’m not,” Arthur insists. “It’s just some stuff I do. Get the thoughts outta my head. My--mentor said it was good for a man. Clear the mind.”

Albert, for once, is not listening to him. He’s flipping through the pages--Arthur hadn’t said he could, and he thought if he did he’d snatch the journal back, but he doesn’t. Albert isn’t reading the words, anyway. He’s foucsed on the opposing pages, the sweeping landscapes and the foolish little doodles. 

He lingers on the potrait of Mary. On the image of a little church half-burned. On Sean.

Arthur says, “It’s just some stuff.” It ain’t what he’s trying to say. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to say.

“It’s incredible,” Albert breathes, and closes the pages. Arthur realizes with a jolt of lightning that Albert’s got tears welling up in his eyes. 

“Stop it,” Arthur mutters. “It ain’t nothing.”

Albert fixes him with a melting stare. “Then why did you show it to me?”

Arthur’s breath goes shallow. He glances away. He looks back. 

“Wanted you to see it,” he says, which feels like a more bitterly honest confession than it ought to feel,

Albert smiles like he’s won some game Arthur didn’t know they were playing; like he’s just made Arthur cry out his name, muffled and desparate into the mattress; like he’s survived another photograph.

**Author's Note:**

> Track me down in the wilds of New Hanover @besselfcn


End file.
